An ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) episode. Our answers when someone asks “What is Rationality anyway?” and they have a bit of time.
(If they don’t have time, Eneasz’s Elevator Pitch is “Rationality is a systematized method of making your beliefs more closely match reality”)

10 Responses to 5 – When Grandmas ask “What is Rationality?”

Like Eneasz, I come from a strict religious household that predisposed me to finding out the truth. I was happy that Mormonism was mentioned on the podcast. That’s my background! There is definitely a “truth is all-important” vibe in Mormonism. But, they assume they have The Truth, and don’t encourage you to explore beyond that. They actively discourage “worldly intellectualism”. Thank you for the excellent explanation as to why the “good feeling” from praying about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is not enough. That is the one thing that people cling to when they have competing evidence. “But the Spirit told me it was true, so nothing else matters”. That was hard to leave behind for me.

And Katrina — too bad you didn’t make it past chapter one of the Book of Mormon. You should have held on for chapter 4, where there is a beheading, sanctioned by God! Looking back, I am so surprised that anybody reads past that. You are in good company with not being able to slog through it. Mark Twain famously called the book “chloroform in print”.

– mostly men
– higher proportion of autistic people than the general population
– it’s hard to figure out the proportion of trans people in the general population, but based on rough estimates, FtM people don’t have a higher proportion in Scott’s survey than in the general population, while MtF people do.